Poems About South Pass, Louisiana

South Pass: The Quiet Channel at the Southeastern Edge of the Delta

South Pass is not the one the container ships use. That distinction belongs to Southwest Pass, the deepest channel, the one James Buchanan Eads scoured to 47 feet with his jetty system and the one that has carried oceangoing commerce through the Mississippi River delta for a century and a half. South Pass runs southeast from Head of Passes, the quieter of les passes at the river's terminal division point, branching away from the main flow and threading through open marsh toward the Gulf. It is shallower, less trafficked by large vessels, mapped on old river charts as the “shallow southern channel.” It carries smaller boats, fishing vessels, the working craft of people who know how to read a shallow bottom.

The channel still appears on Army Corps surveys, and its margins are marked and maintained even if commerce mostly takes other routes now. South Pass was historically significant before Southwest Pass took primacy: it was where Eads first demonstrated his jetty principle, showing that a constricted channel could scour itself deep enough for practical navigation, before replicating and expanding the approach at Southwest Pass. That earlier work is largely invisible now. The survey markers remain. The pass continues south through the marsh on its own unhurried terms.

Life at South Pass: Fishing Boats, Birds, and the Subsiding Edge of the Continent

The fishing boats that work South Pass move through a landscape that is actively becoming something else. The marsh on either side of the channel is subsiding, the land compacting and sinking under its own weight even as the river no longer deposits enough fresh sediment to keep pace. Where the marsh grass still holds ground, the roots bind the soil in place and the birds work the shallows at the edge. Roseate spoonbills sweep the shallow water with their spatulate bills, the pink vivid against the pale sky of the lower delta. White ibis move through the cordgrass in loose formations, probing the mud. Brown pelicans hang over the channel on thermals and fold into their plunge-dives when the fish are close enough to the surface.

Army Corps survey markers stand at intervals along the pass. Some are fixed on concrete pilings, others on stakes driven into the marsh edge, reference points for the surveys that track what the channel is doing and what the land beside it is doing and whether the two are staying in the relationship the charts describe. The surveys show what anyone who works the pass already knows from experience: the bottom is shallower than it used to be in some stretches, deeper in others where the current has been concentrated by the narrowing banks. The edge of the continent is not fixed here. It is a proposition that the water keeps revising.

In some stretches, what was recently ground is now open water. The emergent marsh that the maps show as land can be submerged at high tide and exposed at low. The transition between solid ground and navigable channel is gradual, negotiated differently in different seasons. The fishing boats know the difference by draft and feel. The birds know by where the minnows go when the tide pushes in. The pass itself runs on, carrying whatever the current carries: sediment, freshwater, the outflow of the continent, south toward the Gulf on the same heading it has always followed.

Featured Poem: South Pass

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the quiet character of this southeastern distributary, the Army Corps markers standing at the subsiding edge, the birds that work the shallows between open water and disappearing marsh, and the channel still carrying its portion of the river south toward the Gulf. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community where the knowledge of what water does to land over time is inherited and immediate.

The poem opens on South Pass's defining quality: its quietness relative to its brothers. Not the deep commercial channel, not the wild northeastern pass, but the middle southeastern route, shallower and less known, still carrying the current south. The Army Corps markers appear not as bureaucratic fixtures but as witnesses to the subsidence: placed in solid ground, now standing in something less certain. The birds work the boundary between what holds and what gives way. The fishing boats run shallower than the charts say is safe because knowledge of this water is more current than the surveys. And the close holds the tension of the whole place without resolving it: the channel carries things south, the continent tries to hold its edge, and some of it does. Not all. Some.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Places at the Edge of What the Continent Can Hold

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water's relationship to land is not abstract. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through coastal Louisiana with the eye of someone for whom subsidence and land loss are not news items but lived conditions, present in the landscapes where families fish and work and remember what used to be solid ground. South Pass belongs to this literary territory: the quiet pass at the edge of the continent, the survey markers standing in marsh that is slowly giving way, the birds working the threshold between what holds and what opens into water.

Dulac Poetry is a collection about places that exist at the limit of what land can do at the margin of a continent. South Pass is one of those places: historically significant as the site where Eads first demonstrated the jetty principle, now quieter than its brothers, still navigable by those who know the bottom, still mapped and surveyed by the Army Corps, and still losing ground along its banks to the same forces of subsidence and sea-level rise that are reworking the entire delta. Parfait writes from inside this world, from a community that has watched the marsh change around it for generations. The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

Order the Paperback →Get the Kindle ($3.99) →

Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If South Pass holds you: the survey markers standing in the subsiding marsh, the roseate spoonbills sweeping the shallows at first light, the fishing boats running shallower than the charts allow because the fishermen know the bottom better than the surveys do, and the quiet channel still carrying the river's portion south through open marsh at the edge of the continent. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the Gulf South working-water life includes knowing what the passes do and what they are slowly giving back to the sea.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the delta passes, the subsiding marsh, and the edge of what the continent keeps trying to hold.

Find more poems about the Mississippi River delta passes at Head of Passes, Pass a Loutre, Port Eads, Woodlawn, and Nairn. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from South Pass, Louisiana, the quiet southeastern distributary of the Mississippi River delta running through open marsh at the edge of the continent. The Army Corps survey markers, the roseate spoonbills and white ibis and brown pelicans working the shallows, the subsiding marsh where the land is slowly giving way. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.